


A Winter's Tale

by baronwaste



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: F/M, Femdom, Payback
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-06
Updated: 2014-03-06
Packaged: 2018-01-14 18:45:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1276906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baronwaste/pseuds/baronwaste





	A Winter's Tale

It was, as Sherlock Holmes’s friend Dr. Watson was inclined to say, a bleak and windy day in the early part of March when a shabbily-dressed young woman arrived at the door of those chambers where so many remarkable stories have unfolded. She was bare-headed, and the housekeeper — indeed the passers-by in Baker Street — could see that her red hair was a little disheveled. In many respectable establishments she would have been stopped at the door, but this housekeeper had long been accustomed to a procession of visitors from all classes and stations. She made no protest, but heralded the visitor at the sitting-room door in the usual way.

“A young lady to see you, Mr. Holmes.” 

“A young lady,” the familiar reedy voice repeated. “Well, show her in, Mrs. Hudson. Show her in.” 

A moment later the visitor was standing in the doorway, glancing uncertainly around the cluttered room, seeing in one corner the fireplace with its cheerful blaze, in another corner the sturdy table laden with chemical glassware, and seated in a battered armchair the expectant figure of the man she had come to see, comfortably wrapped in his dark green dressing-gown. 

“Mr. Holmes,” she began. Wavering: “Mr. Holmes. My name — ” 

“Your name is Kitty Winter,” said Holmes, setting down his pipe, the black clay one on this day, in an ashtray at his elbow. “I am surprised to see you again, Miss Winter.” 

“You know me?” 

“My dear young lady, of course I know you. You cannot imagine that I should forget you, after the dramatic experience at Vernon Lodge last year, in which you played the riveting and indeed enviable part of avenger with your vitriol-bottle. Perhaps you know that the good Watson has recorded those events for the world to wonder at, and they have been published under the somewhat meretricious title of ‘The Adventure of the Illustrious Client’. I understand that you have now paid your debt to society, and have been restored to the bosom of your family and friends.” 

“Restored to Hell would be more like it!” said Kitty Winter with sudden force. “Restored to Hell with no better company than the tortured souls who were there before your so-called justice sent me off to Holloway! Family and friends be damned — well, excuse me, Mr. Holmes, but I’ve got no family and I’ve got no friends, unless old Porky will admit to being one. I’ll be back walking the streets no later than Friday.” 

“I see,” said Holmes slowly. “I see.” 

“Do you?” said the woman fiercely. She was almost spitting now. “Do you see? And do you see who put me there? That filthy devil of a baron, and the fat pious judge who sent me to prison for assault — assault, when I should have had a hundred guineas reward and the Order of the bloody Garter! — and you. You!” 

Holmes was standing up, unfolding his lanky frame from the red armchair in what might have been a belated gesture of respect to his visitor. He was a taller man than most, and she was both short and slim, wrapped in drab old garments that said all too much about her station in life. But her eyes flashed blue fire, and it seemed that his grey eyes could not meet them. 

There was a pause before he spoke. “Miss Winter,” he said at last, “I see that I owe you an apology, indeed more than an apology. I, and the illustrious client whose cause you aided so decisively when you threw that acid in the baron’s face, both owe you a very great debt.” 

“That’s more like it, Mr. Holmes,” said Kitty Winter, the set of her shoulders relaxing a fraction of an inch, the intensity of the flame in her eyes weakening ever so slightly. “A debt, yes. And I am here to collect it.” 

“There will be money for you,” Holmes replied decisively. 

“I am told that a single lady can get on very nicely upon an income of about sixty pounds a year. Shall we say five years’ income? Three hundred pounds, then, and it shall be in gold if you prefer not to deal with the banks. My client — I am confident in saying it — will have the funds for you no later than Thursday.” 

“I don’t care a pinch of tea for your bleeding client!” the slim young woman shot back. “You can get the money where you please, and you can give it to me in gold, and you can give it to me a damned sight sooner than Thursday! But you owe me a greater debt than that, and I’m here to collect it this day, this hour.” 

“My dear young lady — ” Holmes began. 

“Never you mind the ‘dear young lady’, either!” she went on, her voice rising. “I’m not going to be so dear to you in half an hour, and I don’t have any wish to be dear to you either, but there’s something you owe to me. Yes, and something I owe to you, and I’m here to give it.” 

She reached inside her cloak, if that ragged and shapeless gray-green garment could be called a cloak. Sherlock Holmes knew well what the woman standing there had done once before, the gesture of half-a-second that had destroyed the face of the vicious baron, and jerked his left arm upwards to make the only possible defence, shielding his face with the green dressing-gown. 

But what Kitty Winter pulled from inside her cloak was not a phial of vitriol. It was a flexible length of leather perhaps a little shorter than her arm, with a loop at one end and a flap at the other. It was a black riding-crop. 

“Frightened, are you, Mr. Holmes?” she asked. “You need not worry for your pretty face, and that sharp nose you keep poking into other people’s affairs. If you had stayed out of my affairs, I wouldn’t have spent a year in Holloway, and you wouldn’t be looking at my little whip now. Your nose is in no danger, but I can’t say the same for your other parts.” 

“You are a quite remarkable young woman,” said Holmes. “I knew as much the first time you came to these rooms, so eager for your revenge on the baron. And now you want revenge on me, do you?” 

“I want it, and I’m going to have it,” she said. The crop hung from her right hand like the foil of a fencer before the referee calls “En garde!” 

“Quite remarkable,” Holmes repeated. “I have encountered a good many women in the course of my work, but I can think of only one before now who was capable of what you are doing.” 

“Who was that?” Kitty Winter asked. Sherlock Holmes, observant no matter what the distractions, noted that her blue eyes were not flashing now, but shining with a steady beam. 

“Who was the woman? Her name was Adler, if you must know.” 

“Adler.” 

“Irene Adler, yes. She was slim too, much like you, and if I remember correctly, she too owned a riding-crop. It hung in her sitting-room.” 

“Well, I don’t have a sitting-room to hang mine in, Mr. Holmes, and I don’t use it in a sitting-room neither. I use it in a bedroom, and that’s where I’m going to use it now.” 

With a single step forward across the faded Persian rug she reached out to touch Holmes on the thigh with the tip of the black crop. 

“Now,” Kitty Winter repeated. 

“Miss Winter, you are a difficult woman to refuse,” said Holmes, and took a tentative step towards the door at the far end of the sitting-room, a door half blocked by a shabby red wing chair laden with piles of manuscript. 

“Now,” said Kitty Winter again. And Sherlock Holmes took another step, and another, towards the white-painted door, with Kitty Winter following behind him. They passed through the door; they stopped; the woman pushed the door closed behind them, though there was no one in the sitting-room who could see them, no one nearby who could hear. 

The room was tiny, and as sparsely furnished as the sitting-room was cluttered and over-packed. It contained an iron bedstead topped with a dark blue blanket, a dressing-table (but that was packed from end to end with bottles and pots and brushes) and a tall oaken wardrobe. There was one chair. 

“Take off that stupid dressing-gown,” said the woman to the man. She did not look surprised when, without a word, he did what she had told him, and spread the dark green garment over the back of the wooden chair. 

“And those stupid slippers,” she said, and in a moment Holmes was barefoot. 

“Now the trousers.” 

“Quite remarkable,” Holmes murmured. “Quite remarkable. No woman has ever said such a thing.” And again he did as she had bidden him, standing in white combinations, a knit garment that reached down almost to his knees. She could have observed that there was thin, straight dark hair on the lower parts of his legs. 

“No woman?” Kitty Winter asked with some scorn. “Well, you’re about to see that I’m not like other women.” 

Holmes was silent, and almost motionless. He did not meet those shining blue eyes. 

“Take off the pants,” said the red mouth. 

Slowly, Sherlock Holmes reached for the waistband of his white undergarment. He rolled it down over his hips, down over his legs, onto the floor. He left it lying there, and stood with the lower part of his body naked. He did nothing to hide the flesh and organs that hung in front of him, the black hair that surrounded them. He said nothing. 

“Turn,” said Kitty Winter. “Hold onto the rail. Bend.” 

Sherlock Holmes turned to stand at the foot of the bed, facing the semicircular iron rail. He placed one hand and then the other near the top of the rail — gripped it, held it as securely as he might have held the reins of a horse or the shoulder of a scoundrel he had surprised in some criminal act. He bent forward at the waist, and Kitty Winter could see the slim, muscled hemispheres of his lower body, above the long white bare legs. 

She paused. 

“You owe me a debt,” said Kitty Winter. “Now I collect.” 

She held the crop in her right hand, drew it back almost horizontally, and slashed forward so that half the length of the leather touched Sherlock Holmes’s body, wrapping around it and just as quickly flying back again. A long red mark appeared across one buttock. She did the same thing a second time, and there was a second mark. Again and again the crop landed — five times, ten times, twenty times. Thin red marks striped both buttocks now, and the upper three or four inches of both thighs. Sherlock Holmes said not a word, and was so silent it was as if he did not breathe, as if his heart did not beat. 

“One more,” said Kitty Winter. “That will be twenty-four. I think two dozen is what you owe me.” The crop landed one final time, and the white flesh, now marked with so many lines, shuddered a little under the impact. 

“Stand up,” the woman told the man. He let go his grip on the iron bedstead, and flexed his fingers as if they pained him. He stood slowly upright and turned to face the woman who had beaten him. 

“I think the debt is paid,” he said in a steady, quiet voice, little more than a whisper. 

“Is that all you’re going to say?” Kitty Winter demanded. 

“I have two things to add,” said Sherlock Holmes, standing in his bedroom, bare and whipped and motionless. “One is that if you come back on Thursday, I will have your three hundred ready for you, in gold.” 

“Three hundred and ten,” said the woman. “Ten is my fee for the whipping.” 

“Three hundred and ten pounds, then,” said Holmes. 

“Guineas,” said Kitty Winter. 

“Guineas,” agreed Holmes. 

“What else did you want to tell me?” 

“Just this,” said Sherlock Holmes. “I too have a whip. I have used it more than once on malefactors. Would you like to see it when you come here again on Thursday?”


End file.
